Unique cookies are a plus for new farmers market

The Port Jervis Farmers Market will begin this Saturday with a variety of vegetables from the Perez family farm in Goshen, and Sunbird cookies from the kitchen of Kimberly Adamoyurka in Wurtsboro.

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By Jessica Cohen

recordonline.com

By Jessica Cohen

Posted Jul. 18, 2014 at 2:00 AM
Updated Jul 18, 2014 at 2:34 PM

By Jessica Cohen

Posted Jul. 18, 2014 at 2:00 AM
Updated Jul 18, 2014 at 2:34 PM

» Social News

The Port Jervis Farmers Market will begin this Saturday with a variety of vegetables from the Perez family farm in Goshen, and Sunbird cookies from the kitchen of Kimberly Adamoyurka in Wurtsboro.

These 6-ounce cookies are main course, meal-in-a-cookie creations, she explains, made with local ingredients. One version contains unsalted peanut butter, whole wheat, oats, dates, raisins, sunflower oil, and honey from the local bees of Jim Kile in Ulster Heights. He started making honey 90 years ago, at age 2, with his father, Adamoyurka says.

Adamoyurka concocted her Sunbird cookie recipe 25 years ago, while working in a Sloatsburg health-food store. She had come to Manhattan from Vermont, where, she says, "Most food is natural."

She attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, but, she says, "I was really just a Vermont girl checking out New York City. I got sick of city life and kept moving further out."

In the process, she married Tom Adamoyurka, a health-food store owner, whom she met while coming in to buy a falafel. They lived on 70 acres in Sullivan County, in a house with no electricity, for 15 years.

For their store she invented the Sunbird cookie at a time before meal replacement bars became popular. The cookies stayed fresh for a long time, and she took them along when hiking, biking and skiing. She made variations such as the Maple Hiker and the wheat-free Molasses Hiker.

But the store burned down, and she and her husband parted amicably. He moved to Arkansas, off the grid, she says. She stayed in Sullivan County and, to call her mother, would often visit the Office for the Aging.

"I would call a couple of times a week, and 14 years ago I walked in and never left," she says.

Adamoyurka is now nutrition site manager for Mamakating, serving meals to several hundred seniors. Her 6-year-old daughter often comes with her and feels she has "hundreds of grandparents." When a driver is absent, they do deliveries, too.

But Adamoyurka likes being able to make the Sunbird cookies at home, a batch of 10 at a time, for farmers markets and the Roscoe Diner.

A home foods processing license she got in May enables her to sell what she makes.

Responding to requests at farmers markets, she also makes gluten-free and wheat-free varieties, as well as carob coconut cranberry Sunbirds.